Sergey Shamba, PM of breakaway Abkhazia, said that an attack outside mosque in Gudauta on October 8, which killed one man and injured two others, was yet another attempt to spill North Caucasus tensions into Abkhazia.

“Like the previous cases, the recent one can also be assessed as an attempt of certain forces to bring events taking place in the North Caucasus into Abkhazia. Someone wants to purposefully drug us into this conflict. Our enemies are doing it, those who want us to confront with Russia,” Shamba told the local television station without specifying who those “certain forces” were.

Shamba said that there was no “inter-confessional conflict” in Abkhazia and “outrageous” attack of October 8 had nothing to do with that.

Mentioning previous cases, Shamba was apparently referring to murder of a member of the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Abkhazia, Emik Chakmach-Ogly, who was killed in his house in the town of Gagra on July 17, 2010. Also in July imam at the mosque in Sokhumi claimed that he survived an assassination attempt after he had found an explosive device placed in his vehicle. Khamzat Gitsba, an imam at the mosque in Gudauta, was shot dead in Gudauta in August, 2007.

Although Shamba said that the authorities would spare no efforts to investigate this recent attack, he also added: “It is a very difficult process to resolve crimes like this.”